Woke up again still feeling crummy- a friend called and woke me up at 10 am- doesn't sound early to those of you abroad, but to those of us here in Russia, especially those like me who usually get up at 11, an early 10 am phone call is disorienting.
I had a dream last night that I met Barack Obama. He was out here in St. Petersburg, and they had opened an American style coffee shop with big to-go cups of drip coffee (I always dream of big cups of coffee when i'm here, Stumptown, i miss you so...) and we were both standing in line. "Excuse me, but aren't you Barack Obama?" i asked. "Why yes! What a surprise running into another english speaker in this country. I bet you come to this coffee shop all the time. What are you doing out here anyway?" "Well, I'm here on a Fulbright. Can I shake your hand?" "Of course!"
That's when the croaking of my phone interrupted the dream and woke me up. I'm sure that Barack was well on his way to hire me as his foreign policy advisor for Russia....
Speaking of Obama, I just watched his 30 minute ad campaign spot on YouTube. I'll admit it- I was choked up when he talked about his mother's battle with cancer and insurance. It'll inspire you to vote more than Ben and Jerry's offer of a free scoop when you show up with your "i voted" sticker. Too bad they don't have a branch out here... I'd already qualify for my scoop of phish food or cherry garcia.

Kaloo Kolay, no work today...

I spent most of today drinking tea in bed. I woke up with a bad head cold and only left the apartment today to grab supplies for chicken noodle soup.
Yesterday Yuri and I started working on my book. I prepared all my materials and started drawing sketches of the illustrations as Yuri and Pyotr covered the studio tables with a much needed new layer of wood. "And next, we'll build a new Russia!" Yuri declared while tightening down the screws.

final product

final product, originally uploaded by laurichka.

Here's a photo of a print I made last weekend. I put it up on my flickr page: www.flickr.com/photos/laurichka but didn't post it here. The print was based off of a photo of a miner from this great book of soviet photographs from the 70's. I love the image mixed with the color printing style because it reminds me of propaganda posters.

I've resolved that next year I am going to live someplace sunny. Enough of this perpetual rain. I always hear objections when i complain about constant rain, "but i love the rain" someone will chime in. And you know what? I did too, back when i drove everywhere. But when you're stuck to biking (*sigh* i miss my bike) through the rain or trying to tame an ornery umbrella while walking on a particularly blustery and rainy day, you get pretty fed up with rain. However, it does pose a good excuse for sitting at home at night and feasting on my pot of minestrone soup while watching episodes of Mad Men online.

***

Tuesday put me in such an amazing and wonderful mood! I met with Yuri (who is finally back in town) and I finally realized that my project is going to happen. Discussing the logistics of the project and getting set up with contacts made everything I had been imagining start to become realized. It was the same feeling I had when I knew I had finished my last thesis draft and all i had left to do was fix a few typos. I'm going to start coming in to the studio on Tuesdays to work on creating artist books with Yuri, along with the regular Saturday classes with Smolny students. This Saturday we worked on figure drawings for the first half, and started with dry point printing for the second half. You can see examples of Yuri's dry points here in his illustrations of Kharms stories
I think I will be using dry point for the first book project that I'll be working on. I have a picture here of Ryan and Me when we were really bitty that my grandpa took of us. My Mom sent it out as a Christmas card years ago and i stumbled upon some extras while hunting for an envelope. I remembered the photos he took of Ryan posed as "the boy with the red balloon" and i was thinking of illustrating a version of the story. Thanks to youtube I was able to find the film and sketch out some ideas. Mine will take place in Petersburg instead of Paris, so hopefully the boy with his balloon won't mind all this rain.

... and so much more to come

There's a lot to catch up on, and I promise to do so soon. This weekend was a whirlwind of wonderful art activity so here's a list of things you can look forward to hearing about:

-Yuri's warm-welcomed return to the printmaking studio, and a meeting tomorrow to discuss my project in depth
-color monotypes
-proposal for St. Petersburg Times article
-found hipster mecca.ru at the "art parade" at Etazhe this weekend
-Vanessa returned from America
-voted today!

Sorry family that I didn't give you guys a call this weekend! I promise to do so soon. Megan- i want to hear all about NY, Marko- don't worry, Barack is rumored to make a cameo on SNL that will surely outshine Palin's.
Love,
Lauren

Make it Work!

Today was straight out of Project Runway. Olga and Yana decided to put together an art show in the gallery space at Smolny, and they decided to do it all in one day. The class that I'm auditing, "The Contemporary Exhibit," gives us each a chance to curate a show in the Open Studio based around one of the strategies discussed in conference. Last week Olga and Yana gave us the requirements for the project, but everything came together today. The concept behind the show is "site specific work relating to the gallery space". All of us participating student artists showed up in the morning, presented our ideas, snagged a piece of wall, and went to work. The idea behind the project was inspired by the show "Rooms" at P.S. curated by Alanna Heiss.

I've posted a few pictures of my piece, you can see the rest of the works on my flickr page here.

The collage:

Close up views:

The gallery space feels more like a hallway- it mostly gets used as a way to get from the main building to the library. I wanted to replicate this idea of people walking through the space without paying attention to it. The figures are all drawn on translucent paper and none of them are facing the viewer.

The show came together and looks great, and best of all, no one was "auf'd"!

Published, credited.

The St. Petersburg Times printed my first restaurant review today!

You can read it here.

Mid-day Matinee

Today Zhenya, my roomate, had a rare day off of work so we decided to go to a movie together. We checked out the newest Russian blockbuster to hit theaters: Admiral. The film takes place in 1917 and features Admiral Kolchak and his fearless leadership of the white army, along with the best set of mustaches to hit the screens since Burt Reynolds. The wife of the General falls madly in love with the Admiral, and in a move that would make Anna Karenina proud, she leaves the General at a train stop to become a nurse and follow her beloved Belomorkanal-smoking Admiral Kolchak all over the frozen landscapes of Siberia (even though he has a wife and son hiding out in Paris).
In a twist from your typical Eisenstein portrayal of the revolution, the white army is led by heroes who refuse to quit fighting even as the Germans are blowing the legs off of their sailors. The revolutionaries are portrayed as disorganized mutts, muddling with the infrastructure of Russia as the military officers try to focus on the war against ze Germans. The film was highly patriotic and mother-land loving; not a surprise, of course, as it was funded in part by the Russian government. Zhenya and I squirmed in our seats during gruesome explosion scenes and when the General gets his frozen toes sawed off by the doctor. Blech.

Zhenya has never seen Zoolander, so the next film we watch together will be much more light-hearted.

I'm at the St. Petersburg Times office now waiting for pages to come off the printer to edit. It's that time of the night again- Tobin's turned on Eye of the Tiger. Stim Table at Reed College has forever destroyed this song for me. It brings back the smell of burnt coffee, matte, the sticky peanut butter mystery messes all over the library lobby and that feeling of late night paper writing. Good luck to all you readers who are still there.

AND since i can't post enough today... Three things that i've been raving about:

first off, Vanessa cued me in to this hilarious story earlier today on JEZEBEL

I finally looked up what the heck Noodling is (click the link and watch the video. it's awesome)

and lastly, if you haven't listened to the new Girl Talk album, you really should. I've been playing it a lot lately.

as promised...

Here's the new 'do. I'm making a face in the picture that says "Yup, it's pretty short!" but by now i've recovered from the shock and i love it.





Still, it's not quite as amazing as Sasha's sweet hair last night:

Fall in St. Petersburg

This fall has been pretty dry up until now. We had wonderful days of sunshine and I spent two of those days at Krestovskii Ostrov admiring the amazing autumn colors. Here are some photos i took.



These are from the second day there, Olga and I went for a walk and came across this fitness class:
We drank Carlsberg tallboys while looking out across the gulf of Finland.

Karavanaya 24,6: apartment tour

So, I decided, since the rain has kicked in and I need an activity that can keep me in bed drinking tea, that I'd post a long overdue tour of my apartment through photos! I took these weeks ago when the weather was much more flattering.

Here's the street that I live on:


And here's my building! Darling Karavanaya 24/26:
(I'm on the 3rd floor- the middle window is mine along with the one to the right of that)

Moving along inside: Here's our kitchen!
My bed, you can imagine me sitting there now with my computer on my lap (although, i'll admit it's not quite as tidy...)
This is the view I can see from where I'm sitting now, with a lot less sunlight coming through the windows.

My piano/bookshelfView from the table:

Told you my room was huge. Here are some details of our wallpaper for full affect:

Kitchen

Hallway

Bedroom

That's the apartment. Now come visit and see it for real.

Published, but not credited.

I picked up the latest edition of Pulse a couple of days ago. There they were! All the translations I did for them printed in the magazine. Unfortunately, my name is nowhere to be found in the publication. Drats.

Awful. The neighbor is at it again. I can't figure out if it's the flat above mine or the one next to my bedroom wall, but whoever it is keeps on coming home at around 1:15 am only to blare their horrible russian synth pop/smooth jazz. Cars drive by and honk, others let their car alarms scream out into the dark. The echoes of the bucket-drum circle on the other side of Nevsky penetrates through my windows. To add to this bizarre chorus are the sound of horse hooves as one trots down Karavanaya street every night at around this hour. Every once in a while you'll encounter someone riding a horse through downtown st. petersburg. I'm always tickled by this and laugh about it, especially when it's one of the miniature shetland ponies.

A lot has happened this last week and I've failed to write about any of it. I started an internship with the St. Petersburg Times, and the most exciting part: I get to write reviews of restaurants! This means I get to dine in fabulous spots around the city, write 500 words about the food, atmosphere and experience with the lovely paper footing the bill. Swanky. I treated my friend Kostya to a meal at a place that advertises itself as the "first photo-portrait themed restaurant in petersburg". The first photo-portrait themed restaurant to pop up anywhere as far as I know.

I also spent a good deal of time translating some articles for the Russian and English magazine Pulse. Their usual translator is vacationing in Germany where someone stole his laptop with all his work on it. This happened around 4 or 5 days before the magazine was supposed to go to print, so the people at Pulse were scrambling for help. They share an office with the Times, so I offered to help. The articles they sent me mostly featured restaurant and business news. One article was excruciating to translate, not because of the vocabulary, but because of the subject: ski vacation destinations in Norway. I was practically drooling over my keyboard transfering descriptions of endless slopes of powder from Russian to English.

I'm running out of hair these days. Mine has been chopped short! It's chin length now, and this wasn't quite intentional. One night while out with some friends this guy asked if I wanted a free haircut because he was in search of some hair models. I figured, why not? I love free stuff! He told me that he wouldn't cut very much off, it would look the same just a little shorter. My interpretation of "just a little shorter" is one inch- especially when my locks had just been cropped a fair amount this summer, so there wasn't an excessive amount to work with. Unfortunately, his idea of "just a little shorter" was around three inches. After three hours of labour (i've never seen anyone cut hair so slooooowly) I left the studio in a state of shock just thinking "it'll grow back, it'll grow back."
Sasha reassured me and told me that it looks really great! It's not a bad cut, pretty cute even. I'm just still in shock about it. I'll put a photo up tomorrow so that you can see for yourself.

anyway, the neighbor just turned off the music, so i'm going to get some shuteye.